1. Then did Moses sing. The conclusion of many large narrative units in the Bible is marked with a relatively long poem (shirah). After the destruction of Pharaoh’s army, the Egyptian phase of the Exodus story is completed, and the sequence of Wilderness tales (the very first is the Marah story, verses 22–26) that is the narrative skeleton of the rest of the Torah begins.

Let me sing unto the LORD. This poetic beginning reflects an ancient Near Eastern literary convention of announcing the topic and the act of song at the beginning of the poem, roughly parallel to the Greek and Latin convention for beginning an epic (as in Virgil’s “Of arms and the man I sing”).

for He surged, O surged. The poem begins with a vivid pun. The Hebrew verb gaʾah means something like “to triumph,” “to be exalted,” “to be proud,” but it is also the verb used for the rising tide of the sea, a concrete image that is especially apt for representing God’s overwhelming the Egyptians with the waters of the Sea of Reeds.

horse and its rider. Perhaps, as many scholars have argued, rider (rokhev) should be translated as “driver” because chariots are stressed, and the evidence appears to indicate that in the late second millennium B.C.E. the Egyptians did not make much use of cavalry. Nevertheless, the plain meaning of the Hebrew word is “rider,” and only with some strain can it be made to mean “chariot driver.” Anachronism about such details is familiar enough in the Bible—witness the ubiquity of camels in Genesis in a historical period before they were generally domesticated.

2. power. Scholarly consensus is that this is the most likely sense here of the Hebrew zimrah, but it is probably a pun on the more common meaning of the word “song”—God, Who is the source of the speaker’s power, is for that very reason the theme of his song.

3. The LORD is a man of war. The representation of God as a fierce warrior is recurrent in biblical poetry and draws on a literary background of Ugaritic/Canaanite mythological poetry.

4. He pitched into the sea. The vivid hyperbolic image of God’s “pitching” or “hurling” the Egyptian troops into the sea provides a hint to the representation in the preceding prose narrative (which is later in composition) of God’s “shaking out” the Egyptians into the sea.

5–6. down they went in the deep like a stone. / Your right hand . . . mighty in power. The Song of the Sea is a rare instance in the Bible of a poem that has clearly marked strophic divisions, as Umberto Cassuto and others have noted. Near the end of each strophe one encounters the simile “like a stone” or “like lead.” The simile is followed by lines that celebrate the LORD’s triumphal supremacy. The first strophe (verses 1–6) offers a kind of summary version of the victory at the sea. The second strophe (verses 7–11) goes over the event in more concrete terms, providing some dialogue for the pursuing Egyptians as well as a more particular account of how God’s breath or wind (the same word in the Hebrew) first heaped up the waters in a mound or wall and then sent them back to engulf the Egyptians. The right hand smashing the enemy derives from the martial imagery used for representing battling deities in ancient Near Eastern poetry, but it also resonates with all the references to God’s powerful hand in the preceding narrative.

7. In Your great surging. Or, “in Your great triumph.” The use of the noun derived from the verb gaʾah aligns the beginning of the second strophe with the beginning of the first.

it consumes them like straw. The straw simile might appear to conflict with the stone simile, but it is generated, almost formulaically, by the language of “wrath” and, in the next line, “breath of Your nostrils,” because in Hebrew poetic idiom, wrath is represented as a kind of fiery emanation from the nostrils. The Hebrew ʾaf thus means both “nose” and, by metonymy, “flaring anger.”

8. waters . . . streams . . . depths. The Hebrew word for water is always plural. The various synonyms used by the poet for the depths or the bottom of the sea are all in the plural as well—possibly a poetic plural of intensification but in any case a form that imparts a sense of grandeur or epic sublimity.

11. Who is like You among the gods. This line has inspired a good deal of rather nervous commentary. The most unapologetic way of explaining it is that in the early part of the first millennium B.C.E., or possibly even earlier, to which the composition of this poem may plausibly be assigned, Hebrew writers had no difficulty in conceding the existence of other deities, though always stipulating, as here, their absolute inferiority to the God of Israel.

Fearsome in praise. The Hebrew uses a plural, “praises.” The word may refer in a kind of ellipsis to the tremendous acts performed by God that make Him the object of praise.

12. You stretched out Your hand—/earth swallowed them up. The hand that smashes the foe here works like Moses’s hand, signaling to the sea to engulf the Egyptians. Since it is the sea, not the land, that does the swallowing, there is probably a play on the secondary meaning of the Hebrew ’arets, “underworld.” But in a doubling of the pun, ʾarets, which also means “land,” points forward to the prospect of the promised land to which the people will be brought that is the topic of this third strophe.

13. You led forth . . . You guided. The Hebrew exhibits a sequence of three phonetically overlapping verbs—natita, “You stretched out,” naḥita, “You led forth,” neihalta, “You guided.” This sound pattern helps to effect the temporal and spatial transition as the beginning of the third strophe moves from the Sea of Reeds to Canaan and, in the space of a single line, from this event in the thirteenth century B.C.E. to the establishment of God’s temple on Mount Zion in the tenth century.

14. Peoples heard, they quaked, / trembling seized Philistia’s dwellers. The national triumphalism of the whole Exodus story comes to a climax here as the victory at the Sea of Reeds is imagined to reverberate throughout the region, panicking the peoples of Canaan who will face a Hebrew invasion led by the unconquerable LORD of Israel. (These lines will be echoed in the speech of Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, in Joshua 2 as a kind of on-the-ground “confirmation” of the terrific impact in Canaan of the event at the Sea of Reeds.) The reference to Philistia is an anachronism because the Philistines did not arrive on the coastal strip of Canaan from the Aegean until about a century after the Exodus.

15. quailed. The literal meaning of the Hebrew verb is “melted.”

16. they were like a stone. It is also possible to construe the verb to yield “they were still as a stone.” However, the image of the Canaanites petrified with fear seems stronger, and plays against the (literal) “melting” of the previous line.

Till Your people crossed over . . . / till the people You made Yours crossed over. The use of this sort of incremental repetition is particularly characteristic of the older strata of biblical poetry. (The Song of Deborah, which is older still than this poem, abounds in such patterns.) The Hebrew for “You made Yours,” qanita, means “to acquire,” “to purchase,” and occasionally “to create.” The liberation from Egyptian slavery is taken as the great historical demonstration that God has adopted Israel as His special people.

17. a firm place for Your dwelling . . . / Your hands firmly founded. The Hebrew noun makhon and the related verb konen are regularly associated in biblical idiom with the solid establishment of a throne or dynasty. Since a mountain is also referred to here, and a sanctum, miqdash, is mentioned at the end of the verse, it is highly likely that what the poet has in mind is the temple on Mount Zion, which is imagined as God’s earthly throne or dwelling place.

18. The LORD shall be king for all time. Although some construe this line as a kind of epilogue to the poem (it lacks the parallelistic structure of a complete line of poetry), its celebration of God’s supremacy corresponds to the endings of the two previous strophes (verses 6 and 11). God’s regal dominion is confirmed both by the victory over the Egyptians and the establishing of a terrestrial throne in Jerusalem.

20. And Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took the timbrel in her hand. One surmises that she is called “prophetess” (neviʾah) because the singing and dancing are an ecstatic activity, and one of the established meanings of the Hebrew term for “prophet” is an ecstatic who typically employed dance and musical instruments to induce the prophetic frenzy. Miriam is designated as Aaron’s sister in accordance with a practice of identifying a woman in relation to her oldest brother. The custom of women’s going out in song and dance to celebrate a military victory was common in ancient Israel and the surrounding peoples and figures significantly in the David story. The women here sing out the opening lines of the song we have just heard as a kind of antiphonal refrain. Everett Fox notes that Miriam is a witness by the water both at the beginning of the Moses story and now.

22. the Wilderness of Shur. The name means “wall” in Hebrew and evidently refers to a fortified region on the northern border of Egypt. (The Egyptian Hagar flees toward this region, Genesis 16:7.)

23. Marah. The name means “bitter,” as the story goes on to explain.

could not drink water from Marah. The desperate need for water in the desert, which is a recurrent feature of the stories that follow, is of course a realistic aspect of the Wilderness narrative. At the same time, it links the tribulations of the Hebrews in the wilderness with the Plagues narrative. Here there is an explicit echo of the first plague when the Egyptians “could not drink water from the Nile.” Moses, who as an infant was “drawn from the water,” and who has just led the people between walls of water, is now called upon to provide them water to drink in the wilderness.

25. There did He set him a statute and law, and there did He test him. Nearly everything about this gnomic sentence is uncertain. Since the only plausible candidate for setting statutes and laws is God, He would logically be the subject of the verb in the parallel clause, though some have claimed it could be Moses. “Him” might be Moses or a collective reference to Israel. The meaning of “statute and law” is obscure because, at least in this episode, no legislation is stipulated. The phrase might merely refer to the idea that it became a set practice in the wilderness that, as in this incident, Israel’s urgent needs would be filled by God, if only Israel trusted in Him. The “testing,” then, would be the testing of Moses’s, or Israel’s, trust in God’s power to provide for the people’s needs, though that is far from clear. In the famous parallel incident in Numbers 20, Moses will fail the test by angrily striking the rock in order to bring forth water.

26. If you really heed . . . and do what is right in His eyes. The language sounds like Deuteronomy, but William H. C. Propp is prudent in calling this “quasi-Deuteronomic diction,” and associating it with the Wisdom overtones of the episode. Wisdom literature, as he goes on to observe, is much concerned with medicine. Here, God concludes by promising He will shield Israel from all the sicknesses that visited the Egyptians. The allusion to the first plague at the beginning of the episode associatively points to the others.

27. twelve springs of water and seventy date palms. After the scary incident at Marah, in which it seemed there was only brackish water, the next stage of the journey is more encouraging, for the Israelites arrive at a real oasis, with an abundance of springs and fruit-bearing trees. Twelve and seventy are, of course, formulaic numbers, perhaps here particularly echoing the twelve tribes and the seventy elders of Israel.